Partial Seams in Quilting

Most of my experience with partial seams is from making t-shirt quilts. I use a lot of these partial seams in my puzzle style t-shirt quilts. I talk a little about t-shirt quilts in a previous post.

What’s a partial seam anyway? I call them “tricky seams”. Have a look at the small blue square in the image above, the one that says “Shootout”. Think about how you would go about sewing that to the pieces around it. If you sew it to the purple piece in the top left corner, you can’t sew it completely to that piece because then how would you attach the white piece to the left of it? If you started out by trying to sew it to the white piece to left you run into the same problem. If you sew it to it completely, then how would you attach it to the pieces below it? This is an issue no matter where you start trying to sew the blue square. So what do you do about it? You have to sew some partial seams.

Layout your pieces and decide where you’re going to start

I typically prefer to do the “hard part” first, but this isn’t the best strategy when you’re working with a puzzle style t-shirt quilt or any other quilt with a lot of partial seams. Notice the piece in the bottom left and bottom right corners. They both have all of the “easy seams” done first. Neither of them required any “tricky seams”. It’ll be a lot easier for you if you get as many of these easy seams done as possible before you start sewing any partial seams.

You can start by partially attaching the blue square to any of the pieces around it, but for this example I’m going to start by attaching it to the purple piece in the top left corner. Follow along with the pictures and tutorial below for a step by step explanation of how I got this part of my t-shirt quilt together.

Sew your first partial seam

Place the two blocks right sides together just like you would any other time you piece a quilt. Sew a 1/4″ seam (or whatever seam allowance your quilt calls for), starting at the edge where the two pieces line up, but don’t sew all the way to the end of the blue square. Just sew about halfway down as shown by the broken red line in the photo above. No need to measure the exact halfway point, just estimate it. You just want to be sure you have a little room for later steps when you will sew onto other sides of the blue square.

It’s a good idea to backstitch a few stitches when you get your seam to that estimated halfway point. Sometimes you will end up with big pieces attached to that partial seam. These big pieces can get a little heavy, especially with t-shirt quilts, so a few back stitches will help keep those seams from pulling apart.

The picture above shows what it looks like now that the partial seam is sewn. Now that the blue square is partially attached to the purple piece, you can sew it to the white block to the right without any tricky seams.

Flip that unit over onto the white piece right sides together and sew a full seam as shown by the red dotted lines in the picture above. You’ll notice we still haven’t completely closed that seam between the small blue square and the purple piece. With this type quilt, sometimes you have to leave the partial seams incomplete for several steps, and you often end up going back and forth between completing one partial seam and creating another until your quilt top is finally together.

Now that those pieces are together, the distance from the bottoms of the blue and white pieces matches up with the unit in the bottom right corner. We can sew this together without any trick sewing.

Flip that blue square to white piece unit over to the bottom right piece pretty sides together and sew a full seams as shown in the picture above. Notice we still haven’t completed that partial seam.

The last piece lines up nicely with the line from the top left corner of the “Shootout” square to the bottom of the bottom right piece without any tricky sewing.

You’ll sew a full seam as shown in the picture above.

Now all you have left is to complete the partial seam. Fold that piece over so that the pieces are right sides together.

Start sewing where you initially left off on that seam between the blue square and the purple piece and complete the seam as shown by the red broken line in the picture above. Once that’s finished, it looks like the picture below.

Every quilt layout is different, but the same basic principle applies to all of them. Sew partial seams where you need to. Complete the partial seams when you can. You may have to alternate between completing partial seams and creating new partial seams, but you can complete your quilt despite the tricky seams.

I have completed the quilt I was working on in the pictures above. Check out my instagram post for a picture of the completed quilt. There are a few more partial seams in the rest of this quilt. See if you can find them and figure out a way to get those partial seams completed similar to how I got the pieces in this blog together.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read my blog!

I hope you enjoyed it.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave me a comment or email me. I’d love to hear from you.

Happy quilting!